Cambridge Library Collection - Classics
2 total works
The classical historian J. B. Bury (1861-1927) was the author of a history of Greece which was a standard textbook for over a century (and of which the first edition is also reissued in this series). His interests ranged over a very wide period, and this 1909 work discusses the ancient Greek historians themselves. Originally delivered as a series of lectures at Harvard University in 1908, this book unsurprisingly focuses on Herodotus and Thucydides, but in a chronological survey examines the evidence for the rise of historical writing in Ionia, and the influence on it of myth and epic poetry. Bury also surveys those historians after Thucydides whose work is less well attested, and the likely influence of the development of rhetoric and philosophy upon their writing, and considers the influence of Greek writers, including Polybius, during the Roman republican period, and their influence on later, Latin historiography.
This book, originally published in 1900, was the major work of the classical historian J. B. Bury. It became a standard textbook on the topic of ancient Greek history to the death of Alexander the Great for almost a century, and in its updated form is still studied today. Bury had studied philosophy as well as classics at Trinity College, Dublin, and had travelled widely in Greece, but until the publication of this work was better known for his two-volume History of the Later Roman Empire (also reissued in this series), and many of his other works also deal with the Byzantine period. He describes in the preface his decision to limit the extent of his history: 'compression into a single volume often produces a more useful book'. This magisterial and very readable synthesis of political and military history encompasses nearly three millennia and the whole of the Mediterranean and Near East.